


time, take your time tonight

by mimosaeyes



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Cohabitation, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Mortality, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-21 08:12:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9539282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: “You’re working with random gears again,” Thaniel observes at lunch.A bit of a coda to the novel.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “You” by Phillip LaRue.
> 
> This was written feverishly at 5am. Parts of it sound hamfisted to me, but oh well. It is what it is. (Timeline is deliberately drifty though.)

“Can Six let in the morning?” 

Hands occupied with holding the kettle, Thaniel nudges the young girl gently aside by bending his knee against her elbow. The odd phrasing of her request takes a moment longer to register. “Did Six forget the Japanese word for ‘window’?”

Six shrugs and Thaniel pours the freshly boiled water into two cups sitting ready on the table, then offers Mori his green tea when the other man doesn’t reach for it.

The action startles him out of his reverie. “Six can indeed voluntarily confront this bracing English weather, if she so wishes,” Mori replies, just a beat past natural. “But please to do it in another seven minutes, after the Haverly boys have departed on their day trip to town. Who knows what temptations an open window may present for them.”

Thaniel watches his fine fingers tap once, twice, against the side of his cup, and pretends not to see Six stealing a cake from the counter as she darts out of the kitchen. He draws up his chair and sits.

“I rather think _you_ know,” he remarks dryly, sipping his own tea.

As though on cue, Mori lifts his cup to his lips, but there pauses again, merely inhaling the steam for a moment before setting down his customary repast.

“Bit cloudy today,” the watchmaker finally says. It’s unclear at first whether he means the weather or the possible futures he can see. Thaniel has to semi-comically duck and peek at the sky before clarity returns to Mori’s eyes and he snorts, at least in part out of derision over his own crypticness.

“Sorry. My mind’s all,” he waves a hand vaguely, almost toppling his tea as he does, “flurried somehow.”

Thaniel has reflexively reached out to stop the drink from spilling, and hums now, easing back in his seat. “Your voice looks different too. Grainy and suspended, like.”

“What does it look like on other days?”

It still pleases him when Mori isn’t taken aback by his sound-seeing, on the contrary even entertaining an idle curiosity about it. “It always looks rosy gold,” Thaniel explains. “But usually in a burnished, rounded way, not sort of — particulate. Eddying.”

He glances down at his green tea and is inspired. “It looks like swirled matcha,” he suggests, flicking his gaze back up to Mori. “Needs to settle and be still, maybe.” 

As soon as he says it Thaniel pulls a face. “Trite, yes, I know.”

A smile curls Mori’s lips lopsidedly as he drinks. “Your words, not mine. And I didn’t know you saw textures, too. I would have asked you to sculpt the Kyrie.”

“Please. Bad enough that you insist on displaying that painting.” He still hasn’t figured why Mozart’s _Requiem_  should be significant to Mori. It’s tinged a shade too dark with morbidity for his taste. But having goodnaturedly indulged in the shared joke, Thaniel pauses and knits his brow. “Texture is new. And it’s just you, so far. Perhaps because I know you well enough now.”

With the ragdoll abruptness that he has sometimes, Mori stands, leans over to tap Thaniel’s forehead smooth. “You are a walking cliché today,” he says fondly, “and yet you still manage to surprise me.” 

“Now who’s being trite?” Thaniel calls as Mori slips off to his workshop. He smiles into his cup. Elsewhere in their home, Six opens the window with a light purple click.

 

 

 

 

 

“You’re working with random gears again,” Thaniel observes at lunch. He doesn’t say that he can pick out what they sound like, doesn’t mention that they look faintly like seawater. But Mori’s breath catches a little as he senses the stray thought, so Thaniel pushes it below the surface. 

Mori busies himself examining Six’s fingernails, sending her off with a look of studied eloquence to scrub them properly clean, this time. 

“I miss Katsu,” he says simply. “Six steals cakes and loupes rather than socks and has the same penchant for sitting in unlikely places, but.”

He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Thaniel is already nodding. 

“You won’t make another octopus, though.” It’s a question, but tacitly they know it for a certainty. 

“I created Katsu for companionship. But it’s different now, and it will be different…” Mori hesitates. “Later.” 

The word rings false, closer to copper than gold, blushing away from Thaniel’s sight. It isn’t what Mori meant to say originally; he’s tucked that away from the tip of his tongue.

Thaniel doesn’t ask what Mori means exactly. The workshop is full of byproducts of Mori’s subconscious contingency plans for futures that never came to pass. Paradoxically enough, one thing living with a clairvoyant teaches you is to stop obsessing over all the possible outcomes. It isn’t worth the worry.

He’s been plinking out the Griszt piece for Mori all morning, but when he sits down at the piano after midday, Thaniel starts in on the Kyrie, watching the colours without texture, without depth. They turn out to be obscurely reassuring in that regard.

Mozart never finished the _Requiem_ ; the rest was completed on commission years ago by an Austrian man. But Thaniel begins his own elaboration from where Mozart left off, instead. In the workshop, Mori pauses.

 

 

 

 

 

They live formlessly, in their own kind of normalcy. Mori continues to make tiny decisions that culminate weeks later in propitious circumstances. Truth be told, with that and his inheritance to remove the grinding pressure of earning a living, a lot of Thaniel’s routines become needless affectation and then abandoned structures. Life boils down neatly to preparing basic meals, practising the piano, making endless cups of tea. In the letters they exchange, Annabel rags on him about his newfound love for the droll and domestic, but in a way that he knows she’s glad for him. His first, instinctive way of putting it was right: he’s turned out smaller, as a person, as an existence, for having been a telegraphist so long; but now it’s as though he’s being reinflated, reinvigorated from the inside out.

Thaniel learns Mori’s unwitting rhythms, not just his sleep cycle or work habits but the undulations in his personality over time. It’s a privilege to hold all the cards, figuratively — the irony of the phrase does not escape him, considering Grace’s experiment to test Mori so long ago. It’s a privilege to get to witness Mori accidentally pre-empting him, then forgetting that alternative as their timeline drifts awry. For all that Mori holds in his head, whole universes it seems at times, Thaniel thinks he holds more just by knowing him. 

Six starts to grow up scrappy and long-limbed, then lithe and independent. Her fusee chain making slows, but by the time it’s evident that another young orphan needs to be rented for the job, Mori has subtly orchestrated her into accepting the position of apprentice watchmaker. Her fingers are uncertain but clever, and like telegraphists have their unique style of coding, Thaniel grows familiar with the turquoise tick of her clockwork, distinct from Mori’s from the outset.

He continues sending telegraphs ad hoc, partly for nostalgia but mainly to score a little extra cash of his own with which to indulge in some quality cocoa from Harrods for Mori and Six. Thaniel doesn’t notice, but he often pulls the cocoa routine when Mori starts growing a little distant again — when his mellow voice starts fraying and his mind flits about restlessly. It’s all part of how he works, and Thaniel being able to pull him back into the present is part of how they work.

Tonight, Mori has paused in writing his journal, ink threatening to blot onto the page. Thaniel gently moves his hand to avert disaster. 

It takes a while, but Mori eventually focuses on him again, squinting in the dim lighting. The lines around his eyes stand out just a little more prominently. 

“Where did you go?” Thaniel enquires congenially, as though asking about an evening stroll.

Mori replies by picking up his journal, flipping through the out-of-order dates, the writing irregularly faded and bold. “I have seen so much,” he says, heavy but trying to sound light. It’s not quite an answer, but it sidles up in parallel to one. 

Before Thaniel can respond, Mori appends in an undertone, “I see less, now. Closer, more details, but overall… less.”

His gaze has been trained on the journal and already grown slightly misty, but it intensifies again. “The future tapers,” he declares. The word choice sounds deliberate: there is an edge to the gold in Thaniel’s vision. An edge that sneaks up alongside his ribs without quite pressing on them painfully.

“Keita,” Thaniel says, to get his attention. When he has it he needs only to intend to voice his fear for Mori to sense it, and recoil — albeit only very slightly, to his credit. 

Despite himself and despite the expression on Mori’s face, Thaniel dwells and picks his apprehension apart. Its seed was planted that day in St. George’s, with Mori lying in bed post-surgery, his more advanced age suddenly becoming obvious as Thaniel, perhaps from a new and enlightened perspective on time, considered how many years they had together. (Ah, together!) And then other signs, signs like Mori growing silently more fussy about the cold morning air Six favours, and Six compromising at all. The occasional unsteadiness in his hands so that some of the smallest tools of his trade have been quietly moved into Six’s box in the workshop, for her exclusive use.

Signs like the random gears pioneered in Katsu, which have since appeared in all manner of mechanical creatures tailored to their lifestyles and habits. Little metal snails that cannot be crushed underfoot, like that unfortunate real one that Six unexpectedly cried over, but instead spontaneously unwind into vines that creep up the table legs or curl over your finger with a soothing firmness of grip. Several tortoises that volunteer to be paperweights for Thaniel’s sheet music, although they do have a habit of wandering off at crucial points, prompting him to improvise some gorgeous variations on the theme.

What future has Mori foreseeing their need for these clockwork companions?

“Enough,” Mori interrupts, clearing his throat conspicuously. He gazes intently at Thaniel, and there is something brisk about his look. “Don’t ask me that. You’re being awfully dour for someone who calmly cleared out his flat and went to work the day of a bomb threat.”

True, the Steepletons are of pragmatic stock. It was Thaniel’s instinctual prerogative not to leave anything behind then, just as it is now, with Mori. In the version of events where he stayed with Grace, he would have stolen years of companionship from him. The way things have turned out…

It’s easier to think it than to say it. So maybe he’s also being cowardly as he asks it silently instead. 

_Keita, can you see where what you remember ends?_

_Is that why you’ve been making more like Katsu?_

More clockwork beings that would act as his legacy, remind Thaniel and Six of what the world looks like with magic in it, later.  _Later_ , like Mori said before, only he really meant _After_. Because he has a good fifteen years on Thaniel, because they were only ever meant to meet when they did. Because short of more dealings with fiery explosions, which are unlikely enough to be unforeseeable, natural causes will take Mori first, leaving Thaniel behind. The only real mystery is when.

Is it absurd to wonder if all the cogs and gears will still turn without him around? Thaniel is seized by the urge to reach forward to Mori, but even here, alone, he remains seated, trapping his hand between his knees as though to restrain it. 

Mori purses his lips and softens, visage and voice all together. “I don’t know why I do anything,” he says, which they both know is only partially true. They take solace in the part that comforts them. “But we have time, still.”

He offers him a smile, even as his golden voice, collected and whole as it has not been for some time, lingers in the air for Thaniel. 

A knock sounds against the slightly ajar room door, followed by Six’s weary goodnight after a long evening in the workshop. Her cot is set up in Thaniel’s room currently; she shifts it on whims. Thaniel calls out a “Sleep tight!” only just loud enough for her to hear.

Hush falls over them. Mori gets up to close the door, and then, with a last look at Thaniel’s expression, snuffs out the lamp. It’s a familiar gesture. _What kind of tea do you drink in the dark?_  

“You said my voice is golden,” he murmurs. His clothes themselves shush as they slide over his skin. He’s closing the distance between them. “Is it still golden now?”

“Yes,” Thaniel breathes. 

“Then never mind what I can or can’t see.” Mori is right in front of him now, kneeling before Thaniel’s chair. “Part of the future is in the dark to me, but you are in it. That is enough.”

“You’re getting sentimental in your old age,” Thaniel tells him. Mori kisses him like a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> I was so pleasantly surprised by this novel. The more I play with it in my head, the more details come to light.
> 
> Come talk about it with me on [tumblr](mimosaeyes.tumblr.com), we’re a tiny fandom that needs to stick together. Feel free to also reblog [my post](http://mimosaeyes.tumblr.com/post/156673910772/time-take-your-time-tonight-mimosaeyes-the) about this fic, which includes some commentary.


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